Mother Apothecary
IT IS OCTOBER AND HOT, midway through the slow bleed of summer’s end in North Carolina. We park the car in a strip mall. My husband takes our two sons to browse a temporary Halloween shop. I go into the adjoining Harris Teeter grocery store and drop off a prescription for Abilify, an antipsychotic, at the pharmacy.
I wait in front of a shelf of Pepto-Bismol and its lookalikes. We’ve decided to tell our older son that Dr. S. has given us all new vitamins. His is clear, and Dad’s, mine, and his younger brother’s are pink, and they all taste terrible! My armpits grow slippery; I fear that the smell of my body is insulting the metallic purity of the store. Everything is lined up perfectly and clearly labeled. It is a very neat place in which to be a failure.
The pharmacist scans the bar code of the package, and I wonder if she plays a game with herself during these afternoons, deciding how well prescriptions match the people picking them up. She has never seen my child, but she knows his date of birth—that he has just turned five years old and will be taking a powerful psychiatric drug. She looks at me, but I do not look back.
Four weeks later, I need to buy a pregnancy test. I don’t go to the Harris Teeter for it. I do not want the pharmacist to look at me again, to politely not say what we would both be thinking, which is that I am clearly not a person who should have another child.
IT BEGAN when sperm and egg met, and there was a skip in the bind and the weave got a pull, one piece of one thread not tight enough. Or it began in the genetic code of sperm and egg themselves, some pus pocket of wrong along a chain of right. Risk genes, they’re called. Or it began when my son tried to squeeze his bones through mine, and his heart rate dropped to the 50s. It had already been down five minutes when the nurse came and got me, the doctor wrote in the medical record. Or maybe it never began. Maybe there is no it. Maybe I am delusional or a liar. Maybe I am simply a Bad Parent or my son a Bad Kid.
. He is born, and we spend two days in the hospital gazing
